2.24.2010

A mom's wise words about chewing your food likely got lost on a giant, long-necked dinosaur that lived about 105 million years ago in North America. That's according to analyses of four skulls from a newly identified dinosaur species.

A mom's wise words about chewing your food likely got lost on a giant, long-necked dinosaur that lived about 105 million years ago in North America. That's according to analyses of four skulls from a newly identified dinosaur species.

"They didn't chew their food; they just grabbed it and swallowed it," said study team member Brooks Britt, a paleontologist at Brigham Young University.

Paleontologists discovered the four skulls, two of which whose bones were fully intact, from a quarry in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. Now called Abydosaurus mcintoshi, the dinosaur species is a type of sauropod (long-necked plant-eaters) and is most closely related to Brachiosaurus that lived 45 million years earlier.